Learning photoshop tricks

I decided I needed to learn some Photoshop skills to take my pictures to the next level. I need to continue to experiment with my camera to avoid too much Photoshop, but I love Bright colorful pictures.. almost to the point of them not looking real. I love the photographer Mark Tucker

He creates his images with different lenses and cameras to get the effects, but some of the stuff can be done in Photoshop. I just like to learn different things to create different looks. The treatment I made to the following pictures is an HDRI edit. Mike let me in on this trick and it is pretty cool. It makes it possible for every element in your image to have just the right lighting.
Here are a few of my test edits with some of my old pictures:

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I also Love Tilt-Shift photography, but the lenses are really expensive. I learned this trick to fake it in Photoshop. I had to borrow some pictures from the internet to practice tilt-shift on because I didn't have any that would work very well. (you have to click on the after images to really see what the feature does).

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It gives the illusion that the images are miniature models... I love it!
I am looking forward to taking a bunch of pictures this weekend so I can create something of my own....